Another list poll (was: SciFil Cons - UK retro show thoughts)

... ... I'm curious: how many people on this list are interested in vintage computers? (please don't reply -- it was meant to be a rebuke, not an invitation to chatter about non-vintage and non-computer stuff) Obligatory real cctalk: I recently made contact with one of the important people in the Wang 2200 community, Tim VeArd. He had an interesting tidbit to share, but first some background. The 2200 is a microcode BASIC implementation, with no native assembly language accessible to the user. The 2200 BASIC syntax couldn't anticipate all the various I/O devices that might be connected to the machines, and Wang didn't want to have to keep doing microcode ROM updates in the field every time a new I/O device was added. Tim at the time was working on secret government stuff, and they had the need to interface the 2200 to all manner of devices. Tim badgered Wang into adding the $GIO() commands. $GIO defined a synthetic restricted machine language, somewhat like the early Apple II ROMs contained Woz's SWEET16 interpreter. This fake machine code would be loaded into an array of strings, and then a call to the $GIO() command would interpret the commands. The 2200 $GIO command set was far to limited to do anything interesting, but the 2200VP $GIO command set was augmented with more powerful commands (but still limited). I've long wondered if anybody, as a hack, wrote anything interesting, like a tiny basic implementation, in $GIO code, or if it would even be possible. I can tell that Tim VeArd has many more stories to tell, and I hope to extract some of them soon. At one time Wang named him the 2200 programmer of the year.